Tag Archives: Women in Science

You can’t have Steampunk without Science … it would be like trying to build a locomotive without cogs! You could do it with great difficulty, but is the result worth the effort? And is it in a recognisable form? Do the wheels fall off when you try to run with it? I have read Science Fiction stories that claim to have no science, but it sneaks in under the door like smoke from a coal fire. After all, you can’t have a coal fire without coal!

This week is World Science Week, celebrating all the various fields of science from the so-called ‘soft sciences’ like Sociology and Anthropology all the way through to the diamond-hard sciences involving Physics. (Personally, I find this sort of description of the fields of science rather judgemental and divisive, and pretty damn useless.) In Brisbane, the majority of the festivities are taking place in and around the Cultural Precinct. You can find a description of the events here: http://www.worldsciencefestival.com.au/

I attended a Science Writing workshop that was one of the events to kick off the celebrations. I wondered if I should attend, since I have considered myself a science writer for over fifteen years, but curiosity and interest got me there in the end. I am endlessly fascinated by how other writers work. It was a well run and very useful workshop, and I always gain insights into my own process as well as garnering some very good tips.

What I did notice was that most of Science Writers mentioned in the course were men, while at the same time, only one man attended the workshop; the rest were women (including me). Several of the women attendees were already working as science writers or scientists (or both). I wonder if this a sign that things are about the change in the field of Science Writing, to reflect the increase of women working in the STEM fields. As well, the workshop didn’t mention too much about blogging, which is a growing arena for science writing. My favourite female science blogger is the SciBabe: http://scibabe.com/

So, as more women find their feet in the various fields of science, gain respect, and go on to have stellar careers … so should the women science writers … as should the female writers in the Steampunk genre. There is a knock-on effect.

A real scientist sees and considers all the facts…whereas a bad scientist deliberately ignores the facts that don’t support his or her theory.

Lynne Lumsden Green

Bad Science. Bad science infuriates me because it is so often used by Pseudoscientists to back up their pet theories. It is easy to make statements that sound valid and appealing, without having packing evidence. However, the supporters of pseudoscience, bad scientists, turn their backs on the truth and make facts jump through hoops. By blurring the truth, they give all science a bad name, so the honest, hardworking researchers are tarred with the same brush.

Over the years, I’ve brought up this issue before on the Science Page. I’ve shown how statistics can be manipulated or misunderstood, how small sample sizes can skew a result, how biases are formed simply by how a scientist picks a topic and design her experiment. This may have given you all, my readers, the incorrect impression that most scientific research isn’t something to be admired and supported. If I have, I do apologise; Science is always working to improve the human condition, improve society, and save the planet.

This isn’t because every scientist is a selfless individual devoting themselves to the greater good (though some are exactly that sort of person). Being a scientist is like any other job … just as a plumber follows the career path suggested by his or her education interest and abilities, so do most scientists. It’s a job. Some days are good days, when the boundaries of knowledge are expanding and a theory is finally proven, and other days are a dull slog through mountains of reference reading or results. It isn’t a job that suits every one; and you have brilliant and mediocre scientists just like in any other field of human endeavour.

But even a mediocre scientist shines like a diamond when compared to a bad scientist.

You see a lot of Bad Science on the internet as well, usually sprouting up on the Internet. And Bad Science hates proper science, because it might reveal the fallacies and inaccuracies in the pseudoscience rubbish. One of the things about haters is that they only see the facts that they want to see. They will shout down anyone who disagrees with them or questions them, and they are often much louder than the real deal. This high profile means that everyone hears about it when their claims are disproved. And so, because they paraded their ‘facts’ as science, the reputation of all scientists gets a little more tarnished. (I am ignoring here the actual Luddites who won’t even accept proven scientific facts.)

So, it is time we put Science back on its pedestal and the scientific community the recognition and respect it deserves.

Personally, I’ve always felt that the ordinary, everyday scientific advances have benefited women. Who has the most to gain from plumbing? It was the women who carried the water from the wells, heated the water for laundry, cleaning, washing and bathing, and scrubbed the chamber pots after throwing away the contents. Few men were ever involved in these chores; they probably thought it built character, or kept the women too busy to gossip, or some such patriarchal bunkum. However, a clever woman is very good at making a man think he has had a good idea. Like internal plumbing or flushing toilets…

Historically, Science has been womankind’s knight in shining lab coats. These days, Science provides all sorts of toys for the girls and boys.

This article was inspired by the Australian government’s decision to no longer have a Minister for Science. I don’t like to get too political, but I think that is quite a frightening step backwards for our clever country. It is up to us to keep Australia a clever country.

All suggestions of additions welcome. This is something I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks, because I really needed a proper understanding of the background for women in Science in the Victorian era. It is only partially complete, but the backbone is there.

Mary Anning

Time

Scientist/Instigator

Achievement

1799

Mary Anning (21 May 1799 – 9 March 1847) was an English fossil collector, dealer, and palaeontologist

Discovery of the Ichthysaurs, Plesiosaurus, and many invertebrate fossil species.

1816

Marie-Sophie Germain (1 April 1776 – 27 June 1831) was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher.

Submitted her third paper, Recherches sur la théorie des surfaces élastiques under her own name, and became the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences.

1826

Mary Fairfax Somerville

(26 December 1780 – 29 November 1872) was a Scottish science writer and polymath (Caroline Herschel was first in 18th century)

Presented a paper entitled ‘The Magnetic Properties of the Violet Rays of the Solar Spectrum’ to the Royal Society

1832

Jeanne Villepreux-Power (24 September 1794 – 25 January 1871) was a pioneering French marine biologist

The first person to create aquaria for experimenting with aquatic organisms. The first woman member of the Catania Accademia, and a correspondent member of the London Zoological Society.

1834

Janet Taylor (1804–1870), was an English astronomer scientific instrument maker, and navigation expert

Her “Mariner’s Calculator” was patented. She produced Lunar Tables for Calculating Distances. She was awarded a Civil List pension in 1860.

1835

Mary Fairfax Somerville and Caroline Herschel

Elected as Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society

1836

The Deaconess Institute at Kaiserswerth was established t0 teach women nursing.

1842

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace,(10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was a British mathematician and writer

Wrote the first computer program, for use by the Analytical Engine built by Charles Babbage.

1843

Anna Atkins (16 March 1799 – 9 June 1871) was an English botanist and photographer

Self-published her photograms in the first installment of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions

1847

Maria Mitchell (August 1, 1818 – June 28, 1889) was an American astronomer

She discovered a comet, which was recorded as Miss Mitchell’s Comet

1848

Maria Mitchell

First woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

1850

Maria Mitchell

First woman elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science

1850

Founding of women’s tertiary educational facility, the North London Collegiate School

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, LSA, MD (9 June 1836 – 17 December 1917), was an English physician and feminist.

the first Englishwoman to qualify as a physician and surgeon in Britain. She was the co-founder of the first hospital staffed by women, the first dean of a British medical school, the first female doctor of medicine in France, the first woman in Britain to be elected to a school board and, as Mayor of Aldeburgh, the first female mayor and magistrate in Britain

1865

Maria Mitchell

Was made professor of astronomy at Vassar College, and she was also named as Director of the Vassar College Observatory.

1869

Founding of first UK women’s university college, Girton

1871

Founding of UK women’s university college, Newnham

1874

Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya (15 January 1850 – 10 February 1891) was the first major Russian female mathematician

She presented three papers to the University of Göttingen as her doctoral dissertation. This earned her a doctorate in mathematics summa cum laude, the first woman in Europe to achieve that degree.

1874

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

founded the first UK medical school to train women, the London School of Medicine for Women

1879

Founding of UK women’s university college, Somerville

1881

Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton (28 April 1854 – 23 August 1923) was an English engineer, mathematician, physicist, and inventor.

Successfully completed an external examination and received a B.Sc. degree from the University of London

1884

Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya

Appointed to a five-year position as Professor Extraordinarius (Professor without Chair) and became the editor of Acta Mathematica.

Made Director of the Bureau of Measurements at the Paris Observatory for the production of a star atlas.

1889

Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya

Appointed Professor Ordinarius at Stockholm University, the first woman to hold such a position at a northern European university

1889

Dorothea Klumpke Roberts

first recipient of the “Prix de Dames” from the Sociétié des Astronomique de France

1891

Annie Russell Maunder (14 April 1868 – 15 September 1947) was an Irish astronomer and mathematician.

began work at the Greenwich Royal Observatory, serving as one of the “lady computers”

1893

Dorothea Klumpke Roberts

First woman to be made an Officier d’Académe of the French Academy of Sciences AND she read her doctoral thesis, “L’étude des Anneaux de Saturne” to a large audience of academics at the Sorbonne, and was awarded the degree of Docteur-és-Sciences; the first woman to do so.

1896

Dorothea Klumpke Roberts

sailed to Norway on the Norwegian vessel Norse King, to observe the solar eclipse of August 9, 1896

1897

Helen Beatrix Potter (28 July 1866 – 22 December 1943) was an English author, illustrator, natural scientist, and conservationist

submitted a paper, On the Germination of the Spores of the Agaricineae, to the Linnean Society. Was unable to be taken seriously as an academic and turned to children’s writing.

1898

Annie Russell Maunder

She photographed the outer solar corona from India in 1898, then published The Heavens and their Story with her husband as coauthor. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in November 1916.

1899

Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton

At the International Congress of Women held in London, Hertha presided over the physical science section.

1899

Margaret Lindsay, Lady Huggins (born 14 August 1848, Dublin – died 24 March 1915, London), was an Irish-English scientific investigator and astronomer.

co-authored the Atlas of Representative Stellar Spectra with her husband, William Huggins.

1902

Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton

Published The Electric Arc, a summary of her research and work on the electric arc.

1904

Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton

Became the first woman to read a paper before the Royal Society.

Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton

was awarded the Royal Society‘s prestigious Hughes Medal “for her experimental investigations on the electric arc, and also on sand ripples”.

Hysteria (noun): anuncontrollableoutburstofemotionorfear,oftencharacterizedby irrationality,laughter,weeping,etcetera. Often considered restricted to women. The word ‘hysteria’ comes from the same origins as the word ‘hysterectomy’ – both derive from Greek word ‘hystera’ meaning “womb”. Back in the Victorian era, it made perfect sense that women suffered from hysteria, because they were considered emotional creatures and too much thinking would send them mad. However, consider the word ‘mad’. It can mean insane, but it can also mean really, really angry…

Happy Quinn from Scorpion -a mechanical engineer and inventor with an IQ of 184 and anger management issues.

It depends on how you define mad on how you define a mad scientist. Happy from Scorpion fills my definition nicely. She is mad at the world, and yet she hasn’t let that stop her from inventing or repairing machinery and electronics. I would love to see anyone call her a hysteric to her face.

I’ve mentioned Temperance Brennan from Bones in previous articles. She can get pretty snippy when the science doesn’t make sense or doesn’t achieve her exacting standard. As well, in her earlier seasons, she would have probably fulfilled the criteria for being a slightly crazy scientist as well. However, I am yet to see her blow anything up … that is left to Doctor Jack Hodgins, who gets to have the real fun.

I’ll stop being a tease. One of the actual fictional mad scientists is Claudia Donovan from Warehouse 13. She invents wild and wacky gadgets and does manage to blow things up once in a while. As well, she often updates Warehouse technology, adapting it or improving it. And when we first meet her character, she is trying to get her revenge on Arty by destroying the Warehouse.

And – of course – the epitome of mad scientist is Helena Wells from Warehouse 13; beautiful, genius level intelligence, and (when we first meet her) completely balmy due to the death of her daughter. She will crack the world to get her revenge. She even builds her own time machine, unlike our world’s H G Wells, who only wrote about it; though it can only send your consciousness back in time. Some of her other inventions include the Imperceptor Vest, which allows faster-than-humanly-detectable movement, and Cavorite a metal with anti-gravity effects, and the grappler gun (which Mika envies).

Helena Wells of Warehouse 13: Polymath and Inventor

You can’t get any more Steampunk that a gender-swapped bisexual H G Wells who is also a genius with mad inventing skills (see what I did there?). Her characterization is dependant on her being a grieving mother, but her intelligence and gadgets are equally important. In fact, her femininity adds an extra dimension to her characterization, rather than overwhelming it. Alas … by the end of the show Helena was also ‘domesticated’, with the writers having her claiming to be happier playing a role as wife and mother rather than as a mad scientist.

Thank goodness, Claudia is a zany inventor right up until the very last episode. No white picket fences for Miss Donovan! She goes from being extraordinary to being more extraordinary!

Well, the winds up my character dissection of recent fictional women of science. Sadly, most of characterisations for these women have focussed more on their gender than their intellects and abilities. It seems that we still have a way to go before women scientists are seen as scientists first and women second.

For fictional scientists, I do believe this to be the case … every character I have posted about over the past three blogs has her character defined by her femininity in some way. This may seem obvious because they are women, but male scientists are generally not defined by their masculinity, but by their job. This underlines the (often unconscious) bias that people have towards an expectation of a character; people associate science, maths, engineering and technology with men. When personal computers first became available for home use, they were marketed towards men and boys even though just as many women and girls were purchasing them.

The best example of this phenomena would be to contrast the two scientists from the same show, such as Amy and Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory … or Bernadette and Howard. As I discussed Amy last blog, let’s run with this second couple.

Bernadette the Pocket Rocket marries her Howie.

When we first encounter Bernadette, she is working with Penny at the Cheesecake Factory, while studying microbiology. She is better friends with the non-scientist Penny than with Amy, even though they are both scientists with doctorates in the biological sciences; I see nothing odd about this, as she was friends with Penny first. She breaks the stereotype of being a ‘dumb’ blonde, and is pretty, buxom and short; however, she is also strong-willed and knows her own mind. I suspect she loves Howard partly because she can dominate him both emotionally and intellectually, even though he is an aerospace engineer and an astronaut, and partly because he is basically tender-hearted and loyal and he sings her songs he had written himself.

Howard loves Bernadette because she is beautiful and sexy and smart, and she got on with his mother. He was a Mummy’s Boy. He met Bernadette through Penny, and the start of their relationship was quite rocky, mainly due to Howard’s inability to understand women while thinking he knows all about them. Since marrying Bernadette, his ‘creep’ factor has been dialled down. Bernadette finds Howard’s friendship with Raj a little wearying, but she still manages to accept most of their strange behaviour when together. Bernadette started off as a comedic foil for Howard, but her role has been expanded.

Raj – the co-dependant best friend

Both Bernadette and Howard have managed to cause major accidents at work, and survived with careers intact. Bernadette makes more than Howard, but Howard has been an astronaut and helped run Mars missions. You might consider their careers on par, even though Bernadette has a doctorate and Howard has a Master’s degree (which is a sore point with him, but he never seems to be doing anything to gain a PhD).

However, when the three women interact, they generally talk about their men, even though two of them are scientists in the same field. When the male characters interact, they talk about their pop culture obsessions, their work, and their women. See the difference? Howard has been given a whole range of interests outside his work – music, comics, movies, and his magic tricks. Bernadette seems to have no hobbies worth mentioning, and seems to spend her free time gossiping with Penny & Amy or doing girly activities with them like clubbing.

The shared bedroom – with little evidence of Bernadette’s personality.

And this is the root of the problem. Bernadette is written to be just an ordinary girl … with an extraordinary mind. In a very real way, Bernadette has been stereotyped not as a scientist but as a woman. Her gender is more important to her characterization than her intellect or career. Characterization shouldn’t work that way.

The domestication of an extraordinary scientist

Look at Brennan from Bones. Her character started off with many personal quirks that related directly back to her career and personality. I suspect it was to be inferred that Brennan was a little weird, possibly she had Asperger’s, because everyone knows that too much knowledge melts your brain (looking at you, Sheldon). As time has passed, she has been normalized as a wife and mother, with a reduction of her awkwardness and those strange little gaps in her knowledge, and a reduction in her enthusiasm for risks.

Professor River Song from Doctor Who – a doctorate in Archaeology

Now, who is an exception to this need to domesticate the extraordinary into the ordinary? Professor River Song of Doctor Who. She has a PhD in Archaeology, but her characterization has grown to show her to be a free-thinker, a vigilante, a risk-taker and problem-solver, who is scary enough that a Dalek will beg for mercy. She embraces her femininity and at the same time is a gun-toting adventurer with a sassy attitude. No one tells her what to do – not even the love of her life, the Doctor. Nor does she settle into being a domesticated wife and mother after they marry; they lead independent lives, coming together when needs be. Instead, her personal growth is about becoming more responsible and caring for other people, so that her ethics improve if not her morals. River breaks all expectations and stereotypes.

Another exception is Doctor Julia Ogden from Murdoch Mysteries. Not only has Julia not given up her career upon marriage – because the expectation was that a woman’s real job should be to look after her husband and home – but she hasn’t given up on her enthusiasm for the suffragette movement. This pleases me immensely, that the Steampunk-inspired television show has broken all the Edwardian-eras expectations of conforming behaviour. Even after marriage, Julia is still fey, flirtatious, and prepared to try new things. I am yet to see her character show any signs of her extraordinary personality and intellect being made to change with marriage.

Tomorrow, I will be pondering further into the implications of the depiction of fictional women of science.

In the previous two blog posts, I’ve posted images of the depictions of female scientists on television and in movies. In recent years, there has been an increase in the depiction of female scientists in both main stream shows and in Science Fiction and Fantasy shows. However, even back in the Sixties and early Seventies, I can remember watching Liz Shaw on Doctor Who, Colonel Lake from UFO and Doctor Steele on Get Smart.

Doctor Steele from Get Smart – gadget inventor and chorus girl.

All of these women have been attractive, but that is pretty standard for actresses so I am glossing over this aspect. Handsome is as handsome does. It is the intelligence and the academic achievements of these women that have caught my imagination over so many years. After all, the eight year old girl that I once was would have needed role models to get the idea she wanted to be a scientist when she grew up.

I studied zoology at university for my first bachelor degree. This is not me. I only wish I looked this confident at university when I was a teen.

There were no real life women scientists I could relate to as a child – Marie Curie was the only one taught in school and she was so many years ago. The only ‘real’ scientists I could watch on television were Professor Julius Sumner Miller, and the zoologist Rob Morrison and Dr Deane Hutton from The Curiosity Show. And, of course, I read everything I could by Isaac Asimov.

Fictional female scientists tend not to be married to their career and often appear to have private lives with romantic entanglements. Often, when they do marry, it seems as if they reject other scientists and marry action men, like Doctor Temperance Brennan, Doctor Allison Blake, Doctor Julia Ogden (though Detective Murdoch is an inventor and technophile), but some marry/become engaged to fellow scientists, such as Doctor Allison Blake (obviously doesn’t have a type); Dr Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz ; Dr Amy Fowler; Doctor Grace Monroe and Kim Anderson – who both marry Henry Deacon (rocket scientist/engineer who obviously does have a type – genius women). Not every female scientist is paired up romantically, with my best examples being Petronella Osgood and Liz Shaw. Generally though, a female scientist does seem to have some romance in her life … and are often shown to be less awkward and socially adept than male scientists (think Fitz and Simmons from Marvel’s AOS).

There doesn’t seem to be any restriction on what sort of scientist a woman is in fictional universes. All the sciences are covered, from the biological, medical and life sciences, the so-called ‘hard’ sciences of physics and chemistry, to the ‘softer’ sciences of psychology and sociology. Actually, I fiercely reject the designation of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences, because it is an artificial categorisation that valorizes the hard over the soft, just as our Western culture tends to valorize the masculine traits over the feminine traits. You can’t tell me that ‘dark matter’ is any more important that supporting mental health. In the Victorian era, the only science that women where ‘encouraged’ to follow were the botanical sciences, because flowers were a suitable subject to ‘amuse and entertain’ woman scholars. I’m glad to see physicists and rocket scientists are among our fictional women of science.

“When can I find the time to do proper science when I have to maintain this hair and make-up?”

One can’t help but wonder if pop culture is trying to explain that even a genius is still just an ordinary girl, by making these characters more well rounded than their masculine counterparts. Amy from The Big Bang Theory started off as a feminine version of Sheldon, but as her character became more important in the show, she started to develop into a well-rounded character with emotions and character flaws and unexpected strengths … while Sheldon’s character has grown very little in comparison. I would argue that Amy’s character has gone through the most growth of any other character on the show, from a logical Vulcan-like stereotype to a proper 3D personality … an ordinary woman, with her extraordinary mind becoming less important to her characterization. Surely an extraordinary mind is allowed to be a little quirky? Why settle for ordinary?

Real life people are layered and have personal quirks. Extraordinary people tend not to settle for the ordinary.

Doctor Patricia Bath – real life inventor and woman of science

Tomorrow, this discussion will continue to explore the depiction of Fictional Women of Science